Stars

When I was a child, from time to time our school would take us on trips to the Museum of Natural History in New York City, where we would inevitably be treated to a cosmic star show at the Hayden Planetarium. I remember little of these shows, since they were immensely outclassed by my earlier memories from around the age of five of lying on my back on the cool tall grass, on a dark moonless night in the countryside, while my Dad would point out Cassiopeia, the vast swatch of the Milky Way, Orion and his belt, and which two stars on the Big Dipper you should follow to find Polaris – which is not only the north star, but also the end of the handle on the Little Dipper.

But one star show at the Hayden has stayed with me – the one where they talked about the Polynesians. It seems (at least according to the prevailing theories of the time) that there had once been a great mystery around the question of how the Pacific Islanders were able to travel from island to island. The islands themselves are very small, and the distances between them quite great. The islanders did not have any of the technology Europe had been developing for world navigation – no compass, no sextant, no mathematical formalisms for triangulating around the great globe of the Earth.

And yet a thriving distributed culture and economy emerged, in which islanders would navigate in their long boats from one island to another on a regular basis – trading, visiting, intermarrying. How was this possible?

Well, according to the lesson narrated with the star show at the Hayden, the current theory was that each island kingdom would, from time to time, send out a lone volunteer to paddle forth in a long boat on a particular day of the year. The brave young man (apparently it was always a man) would follow a particular star wherever it might lead.

Most of the time the intrepid explorer would disappear out at sea, never to be seen again. But every once in a while that star would lead to an island. And then the young man would wait until the right day of the year, and travel back to from whence he came, this time paddling directly away from the lucky star.

Upon his arrival back home, the fortunate young man would be showered with adulation. The king would give him great riches, honor, and the choice of the hand in marriage of the most beautiful maiden in all the island.

Or at least that’s how I remember hearing the story.

For the ambitious young volunteer, it was a good deal. Either go out in a blaze of glory, or get lucky, and be set for life. And, of course, if the explorer was successful there would be another link in the chain of connections between the islands. Over the course of enough years, decades, centuries, this technique was used to build an entire network of connections between many islands in the South Pacific.

For some reason, this story has always stuck with me. The crazy romance of it, the hero’s journey, the sense of giving one’s all for a barely possible dream. It’s funny what happens when you hear a story at the right time in your life. It plants a seed, becomes a part of the way you think about things.

And so it happens that ever since that day at the museum, whenever I begin to doubt my own crazy dreams, I have only to look up at the stars.